Moment Marketing: The One Thing Your Push Notification Strategy Is Lacking
Lately, there has been an abundance of chatter around the web regarding the ‘best time’ for marketers to push notifications. Time being a critical component in any communication strategy and marketers are increasingly accepting have begun to realize the core importance of this attribute. Considering this, we thought of making a little contribution with this article to help them out of this situation. So, let’s get started!
Brands across the globe have flocked to adopt push notifications to drive user engagement – be it for Native Apps and Web. The impact of push notifications is known. There is an increase successfully using web push notifications to drive user engagement and hence incremental sales mad revenue. Web Push notifications when used effectively, can help build a loyal audience and drive substantial repeat traffic. and help build repeat users for your website, along with notifying customers about important information likes sales and new products etc.
Quick Overview of Web Push Notifications
Web push notifications are clickable messages sent to a browser on your device. These notifications can only be sent to users who have subscribed for these notifications. As these notifications are pushed to subscriber’s browser, subscribers don’t have to be present on your website to receive these notifications. Users can subscribe and receive these notifications on mobile, desktop and tablet. Read more about Push notifications here. You can also check out this exhaustive browser push notifications glossary along with that.
Today’s marketers know how to push notifications to their advantage, but frequently fails to understand when exactly the users want to receive notification from them. That implies they are not paying attention to the timing for sending messages and the need of the users.
If this is your notification:
And “why did I get it now?” is your user’s response, then you are definitely missing out on time-sensitive approach for your push messaging.
In order to, not annoy your users or scare them away with overly aggressive and pushy notifications, we recommend you follow some strict guidelines to find the right time for sending push notifications to your web users.
It is time to move from the ‘not so time sensitive approach’ to something the users will love.
By the end of this article you will not only be able to understand Why you should consider timing, but also How you can determine the right time to push notifications.
Importance of time for Web Push Notifications
Timing- one of the most under-hyped attribute in web push notification.
Misunderstanding the specificities of timing can not only make you miss out on the potential of push notification, in some cases it may even be damaging. Wherein choosing the right time to notify your users can increase web traffic and boost your subscriber base, wrong timing can simply make you lose even your loyal customers.
What are you potentially missing with wrong timings
We know very well that push messages have a reputation of being ‘unwelcomed’. When you focus on the fact that over 35% of push notifications are generic “broadcast” blasts to all users, it’s easy to see that a lack of relevancy plays a major role in building this perception.
However, many marketers still continue to rely on generic blast rather than considering personalization in terms of timing, frequency and content of the push messages.
As a result to this approach Over 50% of Users Find Push Notifications Useless.
(According to a study at Leanplum)
Users are constantly flagging most of the push notifications as ‘annoying distractions’ and find them irrelevant.
One of the main reasons- untimely notifications
Hygiene Checks – No rocket science
This is what you can do to fix this problem in the first place.
Timezone Check
Because no-one likes being woken up at 6 in the morning however, funny/brilliant/relevant the push message is.
The time at which your users receive notifications from you is one critical attribute contributing towards the success of your campaign.
Your users aren’t always located in the same time and in many times they are located across timezones all over the world. Make sure the schedule of your notification is in coordination with the timezone of all your target users.
Sending a well-timed push can make a huge difference to your users’
Experience.
A ‘Happy Hour’ bonus during the rush hour to commute home is going to top a ‘Happy Hour’ bonus push at 8 am Sunday morning by a long shot.
Day Check
While planning your push notification strategy, one thing you can not afford to miss is the day. If you have a restaurant and you have planned a promotion -‘meal for two’ on Friday.Sending a reminder notification to users on Saturday will not really be a good idea.
There are particular days and time which has shown evidently high click rates for most of the brands. Make sure you are scheduling your notification around these days.
Event Occurrence Check
Customize messages based on the time of year (holidays) to make brand personable.
Make sure your notification calendar is synced with yearly event calendar. This will ensure that you are not sending any important and relevant notifications on a busy festival day and increasing the instances of it get ignored.
Moreover, keeping a track of events will help you promote create festive offers for those events which have always captured considerable response rate..
For example, a push notification for a restaurant review set to go out two days before Friendship’s Day could read, “Happy Friendship’s Day! Have a lovely evening. Here’s a discount code for dining out with your beloved friends.”
Frequency
Know how much is too much for you and never overdo it
And if you do – this is the reaction you’re likely to get:
The number and frequency of your notifications can vary based on many factors. One of which could be the domain you operate in.
As a general practice
An evident 4x higher conversion rate is seen by sending push notification message twice a week!
Here are some guidelines that are highly recommended and followed by experts.
– News:3-4 times a day, depending on the news, it’s relevance and urgency as per your users..
– Games: Once a day or less. Now, the most important task here remains to be deciding the right time slot for that one notification. Do your research to understand when are you most likely to get maximum response, when exactly will the users be delighted to get that notification.
– Travel: 2-3 times a day. This number might increase on decrease as per the occurrence of holiday seasons, long weekends and many more During normal if you plan to promote a new package available at your online/offline travel agency then this is good number to consider.
– Fitness: 3-4 times a week. Here the quantity of push notifications you send are relatively dependent on the type of fitness your business. If you’re proposing a daily fitness programme then daily reminders are acceptable but as a general practice, try not to be nagy.
The goal behind determining the right frequency for your push message is to stand out in the digital space.
The 3 Tiered Solution-
Sending the right content to the right audience at the right time. Let us break it down further to get a better understanding.
Right Content
The user’s split on the usefulness of push notification reveals that there is still a percentage of users that find these notifications as relevant and helpful. It is either because the messages alert users for things they are interested in or because the content provides valuable information. This infers that the notification contained the right content to establish effective user- engagement.
According to a study at Leanplum, Personalisation can lift push notification open rates by up to 800%
Personalising the content of your push notifications can deliver a 4x lift on open rates, boosting the 1.5% average open rate seen with generic notifications to a much more respectable 5.9%.
There are numerous ways to add personalisation to your push message- incorporating custom image, personalized message, a past action that user took, a thank you note, etc
Timing and content of any push notification goes hand in hand. If the users receive a generic message even on an appropriate time, they are more likely to dismiss it.
Right Audience
Sharing the right content with the right audience.
Your communication should be as targeted as possible. Creating and understanding whom you plan to target (your target audience) should be an integral part of defining your push notification strategy.
Understanding of your user base [Infographic]
Setting the right audience for your notifications is critical as it has a great risk of your entire communication failure if, your communication is targeted to the wrong audience. Creating specific customer personas helps you plan the most effective push notification strategy.
In order to better serve users and not have push messages be seen as annoying, companies need to make a better effort to learn more about their users.
Begin with building multiple personas to segment your audience and reach them in effectively and efficiently. A detailed user persona will help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, making it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to user preferences, behaviours, concerns and needs.
If you run a female centric fashion retail chain and have successfully segmented your audience in personas such as- working class, middle-aged housewife, young mother and student, you will never want to notify all the personas with one push messaging for the sale on babies wear. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Understanding your user base helps you serve them better.
Right Time
Sharing the right content to the right audience at the Right Time.
Timing should be an integral part of your push messaging strategy. This factor should never be overlooked.
You don’t want to send a push notification to your users at 5 am and unleash the wrath of customers whose sleep has now been interrupted only because of you. And for this you need to take care about local time notification delivery.
There are numerous approach that can be followed while determining the right time for your push notifications. Two of those approaches which are indeed beneficial and commonly followed by many brands are-
- Industry based time determination
- Persona based time determination
Industry based time determination
| Domain | Best time |
| News | 10-12 pm, 5 pm |
| Fashion & lifestyle, | 12 pm, 5pm, 9 pm |
| Travel | 9 pm |
| BFSI | 10 am- 3 pm, 7 pm |
| Hospitality | 10 am, 2 pm, 8pm-10 pm |
| Entertainment | 8 pm -10 pm |
| Education | 11 am-1 pm, 8 pm |
| Health care | 12 pm |
Persona based time determination
Here are a few examples:
| Persona | Best time to reach them |
| Working class | 9 am, 12 noon-2 pm, 9pm -11 pm |
| Young mothers | 11 am-12 pm, 7 pm-8 pm |
| Middle aged housewives | 12 noon 2 pm, 9 pm-11 pm |
| Students | 9 am-12 am, 7 pm-2 am |
INCREASING CLICK RATES BY CHOOSING THE RIGHT TIMING
Check this great example of a business that focused on attributes like – time, geo and frequency while sending out push notifications and acquired 125 K loyal subscriber and 12% of their overall sales with web push.
Wrap Up: Get the timing right
It’s time to move from
To
Tailoring your notifications to your users isn’t just about what you say, it’s about when you say it. Finally, don’t forget to expire messages when they go out of date.
You can also watch this Youtube video to know more about how you can start sending local time push notifications now.
Read more:
https://econsultancy.com/blog/63527-eight-mobile-push-notification-mistakes-to-avoid/
http://info.localytics.com/blog/the-inside-view-how-consumers-really-feel-about-push-notifications
http://marketingland.com/5-must-push-notification-best-practices-mobile-marketers-172981
About the Author
Ruchika Sharma is the Product Marketeer at Datability Solutions. The company has recently launched its first product called iZooto, which is a web push notification platform that leverages data for contextual communication.
Ruchika is a part of the versatile team that is working towards making iZooto a huge success. Under the huge marketing umbrella, one of her major responsibilities includes content curation. She has been contributing extensively at http://blog.izooto.com/. Th